by S. T. Joshi
But there aren’t so many, are there?
Rehoboth is from the Bible. Surely the verse is on the tip of your tongue. “And he removed from thence, and digged another well; and for that they strove not: and he called the name of it Rehoboth; and he said, For now the LORD hath made room for us, and we shall be fruitful in the land.” Genesis! Right near the beginning. Rehoboth is a place of enlargement and flourishing. Back in 1643, when the town was founded, people were familiar with the Bible. They knew what “rehoboth” meant way back when. Rehoboth was once much larger, but until recently it was a dinky little town of ten thousand—
Whoops, almost said “ten thousand souls.” That would have been misleading. Ten thousand warm human bodies of various morphologies.
The joke is that in 1993, Rehoboth’s local leading citizens got all dressed up in colonial garb and marched on Attleboro to reclaim their ancestral lands. That’s the kind of town it is. Quirky. Nobody bothered to ask the local natives what they thought of all these shenanigans. Dinky.
Speaking of shenanigans: welcome to the attraction. With the decline of the mills and the recession and all that, the town fathers decided that tourism was the way to spark the local economy. There are hiking trails and a clambake, but this is New England. What about the stretch of time between Halloween and May Day, when it snows once a week, and the only way to stop a running nose is to wait for the snot to freeze?
Stretch of time, stretch of time you can imagine some old woman in a peach leisure suit saying, turning the phrase over in her head. Maybe she’s at the one okay restaurant in town, her bubble haircut fresh from her weekly appointment, turning whisky over on her tongue as she concentrates. How can we get some money for the town during that stretch of time? Stretch, stretch, what a funny word that is. What else stretches? Roads! Aha!
And in that old woman’s mind, stretch of road brings to mind the famous Rehoboth hitchhiker. It’s just a local variation on the phantom hitchhiker that any chockful-of-snore town with more cemeteries than gas stations has. Lonely looking girl wants a ride. Lonely looking girl gets a ride. Lonely looking girl vanishes right outside the cemetery gates. Had things gone rather more poorly for the old woman back in her college days, she might have been the lonely looking girl, forever young and bored with her own tomb.
The Rehoboth hitcher variation is a darker one. A man, a redhead, not a conscientious passenger. He glares, he starts laughing, then shrieking. He’d kill you if he could, with an axe. He’d do much worse, if he could. It occurs to the old woman to check out the local newspaper’s morgue, to have her secretary examine the death records. Rehoboth is a small town; if there are any red-haired men who died in their twenties, and on the side of the road, it would be in the town’s records. The secretary turns up nothing. It’s not a phantom hitchhiker, after all, the old woman decides. It’s the demon hitchhiker.
Plans are put into motion. Letters are sent to particular individuals who have, in a fit of irony and pique, taken to living in Salem, sixty whole miles away. In-person inquiries are made in nearby Providence, because that’s just a twenty-minute drive or so down the road. Certainly we can help, was the general response. Nobody had ever thought to have the witchy Salemites work with the fine upstanding Christians of Providence before, but the old woman believes in covering all the bases. In enlarging the possibilities. There is more than one alternative. Anyways, not just anyway. She’s on the Cemetery Commission; her husband is on the Zoning Board of Appeals. Paperwork is signed, then shredded. Wheels are set into motion. She puts her shoulder to the task.
By Halloween it’s done. The Haunted Stretch. No promises save one—you can drive as quickly as you want on the Haunted Stretch, and if you get into trouble, you can always make a hard right into one of the gravel-filled runaway car ramps.
Forty thousand dollars, for two miles. Your tags and insurance had better be up to date. Leave the Garmin in the glove box. GPS doesn’t work on the Haunted Stretch, not anymore, and you won’t need it anyway. It’s a straight shot. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts knows nothing of it, nor does Bristol County. It’s our little secret is the sort of thing the old woman would whisper in your ear, if she were here, and interested in whispering anything in your ear, which she is not.
You meet the crew in the parking lot of Uncle Ed’s Front Porch, a small ice cream joint on Winthrop Street. It closes early, so nobody’s there but the crew, and their flatbed. Two guys, both heavy-set and swarthy, eating ice cream. Your breath fogs before you.
“Isn’t it a little chilly to eat ice cream?” you say. You regret it a moment later, then decide not to regret anything. Forty thousand dollars. You should be able to eat ice cream out of the high school quarterback’s jockstrap for forty grand, not stand here in the frigid night making conversation with a pair of townies.
The one guy stabs his ice cream with his plastic spoon and says, “Naah.” He’s got a thick local accent. “Everyone here eats ice cream in the winter time.”
“More ice cream is eaten per capita in the Boston metroplex than anywhere else in the United States,” the other guy says. He’s younger. No accent. They could be father and son. “It’s the high fat content; keeps you warm.”
“And in the summertime,” the father guy says. “You’d better eat ice cream.”
“Yeah, you’d better eat ice cream around here, come summertime.”
“Why?” you say without thinking, and then they both smile and shout, “Or it’ll melt!” and have a good laugh. The older guy gestures for your keys, and you hand them over. You glance at his work jeans—the ass is clean, at least. The son tilts the bed and invites you into the truck’s warm cab.
You climb in, belt up, smile at the kid. He’s probably a good kid, just working with his dad and trying to find a place in a small town that he’s already a little too big for. He should be in school, in Boston, mackin’ chicks or suckin’ dicks depending on his preference. You’ll tell him that afterwards, you decide. Maybe slip him a few bucks if he has any weed, to take the edge off the experience with the night.
“So, is this where you dose me with—” you don’t get to say the chloroform before he hits you with the stun gun.
You wake up in your car, a cherry taste in your mouth. You feel very good, as if the jolt you took from the kid charged the juice in your spine. It was all in the watermarked, password- protected, DRMed, and self-destructing PDF you received when you sent your money in. Skeptics used to think that the enhancement drug was the core of the attraction— mild hallucinogens and the power of suggestion were enough to give most rubes the experience they deserve, if not exactly want.
The skeptics shut the fuck up after someone wearing Google Glass took a ride down the Haunted Stretch of Rehoboth. That’s when you took out a loan, using your shitty Union City, New Jersey, condo as collateral, and got to filling out the proper forms.
You were never even all that much interested in ghosts, or religion, or the supernatural. You just wanted to experience something that most people won’t ever be able to. Everything from cage fighting to summers among the Antarctic penguins is available for anyone with the money and spare time. But to keep out the losers, weirdoes, and journalists, the old woman added a wrinkle to her dark ride—the application came with a text box, and no instructions.
In it you wrote:
Honestly, whenever I think about my past, about stupid things I’ve said or done, I mutter aloud, “I just want to kill myself.” Sometimes I actually sing it to myself, and add “doo-dah doo-dah” to the end. But I don’t really want to kill myself. I just think about it for a few seconds every day, several times a day. Hopefully the experience will help me deal with whatever it is that I’m dealing with.
You were surprised at your own admission. Like how you drop a hot potato before you get burned, your fingers typed it in without you even having to think about it. Anyway, it worked. Either that, or they just have a lottery and you happen
ed to win. Anyways, something happened and you’re here now, behind the wheel of your car, your heart pumping liquid joy to your limbs. You don’t want to kill yourself. You want to dig a hole in the asphalt and fuck the world till she comes. You want to drive so fast you’ll zip past the patch of light made by your headlamps and into the swirling dark of Rehoboth’s winter.
You move to turn the key in the ignition, and only then do you realize that the engine is already running. The lights are on, after all. It’s warm in the cab, of course. You’re so fucking stupid. But you don’t think I want to kill myself. You smile; you lick your own teeth to taste more of the cherry gunk; you love being alive. Sing that!
I love being alive!
But you ease up on the accelerator. You’ve got two miles for something to happen, and that ain’t a lot. Oh, how you want something to happen. You don’t even care if it’s just an actor, or a hallucination, or both. You don’t even care if the redhead opens a mouth full of yellow tombstone teeth and bites your fucking nose off, like what happened to the guy on the other end of the Google Glass.
The car rolls forward, and you start to sweat ice water. Whatever the cherry stuff is, it’s pretty crazy. Rehoboth should have just packaged the cherry stuff as an energy drink rather than going through all this trouble to balance the town’s accounts. Eh, it’s probably extremely illegal, you decide. Not like charging people forty thousand dollars to drive down a stretch of decommissioned town road.
Do I step out from behind a tree, thumb out? Should I materialize in the passenger seat and put my hand on your knee and wink and call you boyfriend? Or just rise up before the car, eyes and mouth wide, palm outstretched?
Fuck it, I take the roof. I don’t feel a thing, but you sure do, when two-hundred- twenty pounds of mostly muscle slams into the slope of your PT Cruiser. I crack the windshield with my forehead, and scream and laugh and howl as you jerk the wheel hard to the left, then hard to the right.
I love.
The screech of the tires.
How they smell as they melt by millimeters.
Tree branches snapping against the windows.
Gravel like hail.
My fist through the window, spiderwebbing it.
Glass everywhere, like thousands of shattered teeth.
You’re a toughie, man. A cookie what won’t crumble easy. You actually throw a punch at me. Right at me. I feel it and everything.
I start laughing and laughing. Oh ho ho ho. That ain’t blood pouring out my nose. It’s the cherry stuff.
Anyways.
No, as a matter of fact, I’m not from around here.
Hey, sailor? New in town?
Come here often?
I cut your legs out from under you and take a seat on your belly.
You fuck, you fuck!
What I am going to do, with my awesome magic powers, is remove your central nervous system, starting from this little slice at the bottom of your pinky toe.
Forty-five miles of string.
Don’t worry. I work fast. I have all the time in the world. I’m well practiced. I can do three hundred yards with a tug. Leaves me all night to floss my teeth with the stuff, tie little knots where I want them, and to untie the ones you’ve tied yourself.
Fucking amateurs.
In the old days, I used to construct harps out of this shit, and human spines.
A phantom hitchhiker ain’t nothin’. It’s a fingerprint. A cosmic smudge on the night. Me, I’m the real deal, the genuine article. The thing what left the smudge. Unleashed! Thanks to the spirit of intermunicipal cooperation.
And you got me for forty grand! Not too shabby, Ace.
So what I am going to do now is tie one end of your nervous system to your brain stem and another to this bright little star I have in my pocket, and then I’m going to let go of it, see, and it’s going fly up up up into the firmament, stretching the tissue till it licks the edge of space.
Move over.
Hahaha, I kid, I kid.
Forgive the nudge, I know you can’t move over.
Let me just nestle down here and cuddle on up next to you.
The asphalt’s nice and warm, thanks to the skidding. Good job with that.
Doesn’t it look cool up there, my little star? It’s like an awesome little kite, the string leading down to your nose.
You have a very distinguished-looking nose. The nose of kings, friend!
It’s nice out here in Rehoboth. Not a lot of streetlamps, or tall buildings, so you can really see the stars.
One more nudge. See, look at that? Doesn’t all the glass on the street look a lot like the stars? And the little snowflakes that are starting to fall? They look like the stars too, the teensy ones we can only see if we live out in the country and eat our carrots, like mama said.
That’s some cool shit right there, Ace.
Okay. Now what you need to do, and I’ll hold your hand and squeeze it until you do, is inhale.
That’s right, suck it all back in.
We’ve got all night. Hell, we’ve got all night, every night. I hitchhike through space, not through time. I’m already all over this whole stretch of time.
Aw, do your fingers hurt? Well, inhale more, you dirty little fuck!
Like you’re eating spaghetti with your nose. Slurp it all back in to your body.
And no, had you shown up wearing one of those streaming Internet glasses, I just would have ripped your face off. Fuck you apes, and your YouTube.
Keep it up. Snort snort. Oink for me, baby.
There is no alternative. Any way you slice it, and I can slice it any which way, you need to get all this stuff back into you, and I need my little star back.
It’s a good luck charm.
You’re doing real good. Real good. See, you can feel your face again. Yeah, it fucking hurts.
Don’t cry.
I’ll give you some more cherry stuff. Let me just—
There we go. Keep your head on my lap, just like a little baby, and drink all you like. I’m gonna let it pour right down my chin.
And keep snuffling your nerve tissues back into your body.
Let me tell you a bit more about the old woman. She picked me up once, even though women in those days didn’t often drive on their own, and didn’t ever stop for strangers.
She liked anonymous dick. There’s nothing wrong with it. Lots of people do. You do, don’t you?
People just don’t like to think of civic-minded ladies as horny little nymphs wearing nothing but bush beneath their sundresses. She was a smart girl too. Went to Radcliffe, back when girls went to Radcliffe instead of Harvard proper. And when she picked me up, she sang:
But if I should leave my husband dear,
Likewise my little son also,
What have you to maintain me withal,
If I along with you should go?
She’d spotted me right off. James Harris, the Daemon Lover. I’m a goddamn English ballad, sport. But I had no ships upon the sea, no mariners to wait upon thee, anymore. They’re all at the bottom of the Atlantic. Especially those fucking mariners. They got me here, to America, but they had to die.
So I have to hitchhike.
She picked me up. We had a wild time, a good one. I buried myself deep inside her. So deep she could never stop thinking of me, no matter how many husbands she burned through— and she’s had four—nor how many other anonymous lovers she’s had.
How many? Count the stars, son. How many can you see, on a clear night like this, through blurred and stinging eyes? And keep sucking!
She tried to forget me, but she couldn’t.
She’s watching right now.
Don’t look around.
Anyway, this is how she likes it. It’s how I like it too.
Anyways, there are so many things I like to do. And little old ladies are one of them. And my li
ttle old lady likes selling kitsch. There’s a T-shirt in your goodie bag, back at the hotel.
I SURVIVED THE HAUNTED STRETCH OF REHOBOTH.
It says that, for real. It was blank before, but you’re doing such a good job.
Tell your friends about us.
There. You’re almost done. It’s almost dawn.
Don’t look around. Not at that hill on the right, that shines so clear to see. Not on the hill to the left, that looks so dark to thee. You look straight fucking ahead. Don’t make me break your neck. Eyes ahead, you little shitsack. Anyway, anyways, you can.
Going to Ground
Darrell Schweitzer
So in the end he simply yielded to what had previously balanced somewhere between a wry observation and a morbid obsession. In the course of the many road trips he’d taken for his work, as he made his way up through northeastern Pennsylvania, through Scranton, Mt. Pocono, Jim Thorpe, and Chorazin, and into New York State by way of Binghamton and on to Rochester or Albany, he had begun to notice, particularly while driving alone late at night, how remarkably empty the landscape was of any trace of mankind at all, and how civilization, in the form of villages, farms, or rest stops, was only in the valleys. The ridges of the forested hills that stretched on for endless miles seemed absolutely primordial. He’d joked once to his wife that if an invading army of orcs ever followed those ridge lines and refrained from shooting off fireworks or playing their boomboxes too loud, they could make it nearly to the state capital in Harrisburg without being detected. Sometimes, at sunset, in the winter, when he could see the bare trees silhouetted by the glare of the sky, he fancied that he could glimpse mysterious shapes darting between the black trunks; and he imagined, too, that the light from beyond those hills was not entirely of this world.
Therefore, on this last night, in his great pain, he drove without knowing where he was going, like an animal mindlessly going to ground, and he pulled over in the middle of a particularly dark stretch of nowhere, without even the distant glimmer of a farmhouse in sight. He let the car roll into what might have been a natural clearing or the remains of some abandoned field. Then, because his nature must have been methodical somewhere else in his life, he put the gearshift in park, shut off the engine, pulled the parking brake, turned off the headlights, carefully removed the keys from the ignition, then got out and locked the car, placing the keys in his pocket.